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To promote your business and support your customers, you often
have to provide lengthy explanations. But few people want to read
wordy reports, and videos can be costly and time consuming to
produce.

That's where online slide presentations come in. They can be both
an effective and user-friendly way to explain and market your
products and services. Even better, if you put your slideshows
online in a mobile-friendly, linkable, shareable way, they can
make it especially easy for people to find and recommend your
business. Slideshows published on popular online platforms like
SlideShare and SpeakerDeck often get high placement in
search results and can drive a considerable amount of traffic
to small-business websites that otherwise might not have
strong search visibility.

Here are some tips for producing engaging slide decks:

Use presentation tools to create the slides.
While most slide publishing tools will convert PDF files to
slide decks, you can use PowerPoint, Keynote or HaikuDeck to
make your slides. These can offer superior capabilities for
including video and multimedia, as well as better visual
design.

Present lots of images. Use your best photos,
charts and illustrations. Choose images that work well on small
smartphone displays and don't reduce the size of your text too
much.

Include hyperlinks. When you post a slide deck
online, always include hyperlinks that lead back to relevant
pages on your website. Put the hyperlinks directly in the
slides, not just in the description of your slideshow. And once
your slide deck is online, be sure to embed it on your own
website, as well as share it through social media.

Optimize for search. Use tags and other kinds
of "metadata" to make your deck easier to find in searches.
This helps not only for internal search on a site like
SlideShare but also for search engine optimization.

Beyond those basics, you want to create slideshows that will help
you achieve your business objectives. Kit Seeborg and Andrea
Meyer, authors of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow
Your Business (O'Reilly, June 2013), offer the
following tips for using slideshows to build your business.

1. Tell your company's stories.
Storytelling is one of the most compelling forms of
communication, and sequential slide decks can be a powerful tool
for providing a visual and auditory narrative about your company.
Slideshows can include pivotal moments for your business or
customers, success stories and lessons learned.

IT management consultant Robert Star provides some practical tips
on organizational storytelling:

2. Create an online catalog of products or
services.
If you've already created a print or web-based catalog listing
everything your business offers, this content can easily be
repurposed as a slide deck. Most online slideshow tools can take
a PDF file and convert it to a slide deck. One example is
Absolute Office Interior's catalog. But to
create a better user experience, try to rework the content of
your catalog into slide format rather than simply upload the
PDF file.

Seeborg notes that this approach lets people download and run
your slide deck offline -- especially handy for your staff or
clients who might be in the field with limited Internet or cell
network access. "Real estate brokers are doing this a lot," she
says. Also, on SlideShare you can link to a specific slide in a deck, which
can be useful in directing people to the information they need
most.

If you keep hearing the same questions about a topic you know
well, you might want to assemble a slide deck that offers some
answers. Then, you can post a link to the deck whenever that
topic arises in social media or in blog comments. If your deck is
brief, helpful and even fun, people will likely recommend and
share it -- the most effective form of marketing for any
business.

This is why it's important to post your slides using a tool that
allows both embedding and analytics, so you can track how much
it's being used, and by whom. This can provide business leads and
other useful connections.

4. Find investors.
Meyer notes that creating an online "pitch deck" explaining the
value of your business or startup idea can attract the attention
of venture capitalists and other funders.

"Often, startups create these for pitch events, but if you post
it online where it can get indexed by search engines it can
attract a wider audience," Meyer says.

Former venture capitalist Ryan Spoon offers tips for making a
pitch deck:

5. Discover collaborators, partners and
advisors.
Slide decks also can help you connect with other professionals
and organizations that may support and enhance your work.

Seeborg and Meyer recommend searching SlideShare for relevant
presentations and following users with complementary expertise.
You also can embed their presentations on your site or share them
via social media -- activity they will likely notice through
account analytics.

You also can use your slide deck to connect to others by quoting
them in your slides and offering hyperlinks to their websites. If
they're watching their site analytics, they'll see the inbound
traffic from your deck. You also could send them an email to let
them know you've quoted or promoted them, with a link to your
deck.